One Response to “Kipling on film”

“The poet T. S. Eliot edited A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (1941) with an introductory essay. Eliot was aware of the complaints that had been levelled against Kipling and he dismissed them one by one: that Kipling is ‘a Tory’ using his verse to transmit right wing political views, or ‘a journalist’ pandering to popular taste; while Eliot writes ‘I cannot find any justification for the charge that he held a doctrine of race superiority.’ Eliot finds instead

‘An immense gift for using words, an amazing curiosity and power of observation with his mind and with all his senses, the mask of the entertainer, and beyond that a queer gift of second sight, of transmitting messages from elsewhere, a gift so disconcerting when we are made aware of it that thenceforth we are never sure when it is not present: all this makes Kipling a writer impossible wholly to understand and quite impossible to belittle.’”